BUDAPEST — The assassination of Gdańsk Mayor Paweł Adamowicz, who died Monday after he was attacked at a charity event over the weekend, has plunged Poland into grief and shock. But an even greater tragedy may be lying in wait.

In the hours since Adamowicz’s death, Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party — joined by some well-intentioned but misguided liberal voices — has urged Poles not to jump to premature conclusions about the murder or seek to politicize the attack. Most worryingly, it is calling for national unity in the face of deepening political conflict.

The government’s plea is self-serving. While there is no evidence that Law and Justice was in any way involved in the murder of Adamowicz, the murder of one of the party's most vocal critics has created an atmosphere of fear and emergency that it is likely to exploit to accelerate its near-total takeover of independent institutions and do away with what’s left of Poland’s democracy.

Since taking power in 2015, Law and Justice has instituted a blatantly unconstitutional takeover of Poland’s judiciary, public prosecutor’s office, independent civil service and its public service broadcasters. Its actions prompted the European Commission to initiate, for the first time in its history, the procedure to recognize “a clear risk of a serious breach” to the democratic rule of law in an EU country.

The government’s call not to jump to conclusions highlights the stark reality that credible information about the attack will be impossible to come by as long as Law and Justice remains in power.

The most chilling response to the attack has been the government’s call for national unity.

Indeed, it is laughably naïve to assume that the purged public prosecution service will conduct a thoroughly honest investigation. Just a few months ago, it leveled absurd criminal tax fraud charges against Adamowicz in a thinly veiled attempt to derail his bid for a sixth term as mayor of Gdańsk, where he was a highly popular — and vocally anti-government — figure.

Similarly, Law and Justice’s warning not to politicize Adamowicz’s death is part of a standard playbook used by regressive forces to diffuse justified outrage about their policies. Like American conservatives after a mass shooting, Polish right-wing politicians and commentators have gone to great lengths to portray the assault on Adamowicz as “inexplicable” and “mysterious,” and emphasized the attackers’ criminal background and the mental health issues.

This kind of narrative effectively ties the opposition’s hands: Compounded with the lack of a credible investigative body, the government’s insistence that the attack is an aberration in no way related to its policies makes it that much more difficult to call out the ugly political tactics of a ruling party that has made waging all-out war against its critics a cornerstone of its political strategy.

The somber reality is that two centers of the liberal opposition, independent city mayors and secular civil society, were targeted Sunday. Both Adamowicz and the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity — Poland’s largest annual charity drive organized outside of the Catholic Church — have been subjected to a relentless hate campaign by state-owned media and increasing harassment by Polish authorities. Gdańsk’s city hall was also under near constant monitoring by the government-controlled anti-corruption bureau.

A picture taken on April 21, 2018 shows the Mayor of Gdańsk Paweł Adamowicz as he gives a speech in front of people taking part in an anti-fascist demonstration in Gdańsk, Poland | Simon Krawczyk/AFP via Getty Images

Law and Justice went to great lengths to starve the Orchestra charity of government support. Senior PiS politicians warned all government employees not to help the charity. Just last week, a major daily in Gdańsk reported that Orchestra's spokesman was worried about a “significant decrease of government support” for the big final event.

Indeed, at Sunday’s event, Adamowicz, clearly did not have even the most rudimentary police protection, despite being the mayor of one of Poland’s largest cities. By contrast, most government-supported events, including the monthly commemoration of the Smolensk plane crash, typically include massive police presence.

But the most chilling response to the attack has been the government’s call for national unity.

From the Reichstag fire to Turkey’s attempted military coup in 2016, history offers an abundance of cases when a sense of emergency is ruthlessly leveraged by an aspiring authoritarian regime to consolidate power. The mechanism is always the same: fear-induced unity silences the opposition and legitimizes a heavy-handed response by the government.

Worrisome signs of this dynamics have already begun to emerge.

A group of think tanks — including, unfortunately, some liberal organizations — have circulated a call to criminalize hate speech on the internet. Those who support this idea fail to realize that a selective application of that law by PiS-controlled prosecutors and judges may become yet another weapon against the opposition.

Poland can't afford to let Adamowicz’s dream of an “open, tolerant, generous” country die with him.

Likewise, calls to ramp up security at public events risk being used by the government to further constrain the rights of opposition and civil society groups to organize. The charismatic leader of the charitable Orchestra has already resigned under pressure.

Both Poland’s opposition and the country’s European partners can't let themselves be fooled by the government’s righteous indignation at Adamowicz’s assassination. The country needs an independent inquiry into the murder and a careful review of government procedures to grant or deny police support at public events as well as protection for opposition politicians.

Poland’s opposition must come out against any proposed laws that would further chip away at the country’s democratic institutions and strip away their rights, and should use the special election for the mayor of Gdańsk, to be held in less than three months, as an occasion to unite and mobilize.

Poland can't afford to let Adamowicz’s dream of an “open, tolerant, generous” country die with him.

Maciej Kisilowski is associate professor of law and public management at Central European University in Budapest.